- China is coercing the Uighurs to leave Xinjiang on job transfer schemes, shows a leaked report.
- The report, addressed to Chinese officials, said the transfers “merge and assimilate Uighur minorities”.
- Beijing considers Uighurs a terrorist risk and has worked to erase their culture.
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A report leaked to Chinese officials suggests that Beijing is offering jobs to Uighurs thousands of miles from their homeland and pressuring them to accept, in an attempt to erode their personal and regional identity.
Since 2016, China has held about a million Uighurs in its homeland, Xinjiang, in hundreds of prison camps throughout the region. China says Uighurs are a terrorist threat and is accused of brainwashing Uighurs and trying to reduce the birth rate, which has led the United States and Canada to accuse Beijing of genocide.
China’s repression was characterized by forced abortions and sterilizations, rape, arbitrary arrests, forced labor and relentless surveillance.
But in a new revelation, Beijing appears to be actively working to remove Uighurs from their homeland and force them to assimilate Chinese culture, sending them to work in distant parts of the country as part of a job transfer scheme, from according to a May 2018 report by Nankai University and circulated among senior Chinese officials.
The report was obtained by the BBC and Dr. Adrian Zenz, a leading scholar of China’s actions in Xinjiang.
The report, based on research conducted in Xinjiang’s Hotan province, was brought online in December 2019, but removed in mid-2020, according to Zenz’s analysis. The BBC said the report was accidentally posted online.
Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Noel Celis / Getty Images
The report called job transfers “an important method for influencing, merging and assimilating Uighur minorities” and achieving a “transformation of their thinking”.
China has always characterized its actions in Xinjiang, including the detention of Uighurs, as a way to purge them of so-called extremist thoughts. A visitor to a detention camp told the BBC in 2018 that he saw people being forced to sing propaganda songs to get food.
“Let them gradually change their thinking and understanding, and transform their values and outlook on life through a change in environment and work,” added the report, according to an English translation.
Zenz wrote that Chinese academics argued that job transfers “are a crucial means of ‘opening up solidified society’ and mitigating the negative impact of religion”.
Residents line up inside a vocational skills training center at Kunshan Industrial Park in Artux, western Xinjiang.
AP / Ng Han Guan
Scholars in the report said there was an “extremely excessive” number of Uighur surplus workers who posed a “latent threat to the current regime,” wrote Zenz.
Zenz added: “The primary objectives of labor transfers are not economic, but political and demographic”, adding that they are “an integral part of the state’s cultural and demographic genocide campaign”.
“Government documents state that labor transfers are part of the ‘raising the quality of the population’ … a concept commonly found in family planning policies that has been associated with eugenics,” wrote Zenz.
The Chinese government told the BBC that Zenz’s report “reflects only the author’s personal opinion and much of its content is not in line with the facts”.
Erin Farrell Rosenberg, a former senior consultant at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, said the report shows that there are “credible bases for concluding” that the job transfer scheme constitutes crimes against humanity, said Zenz.